Tag Archives: Single-Motherhood

Polemics

Economist asks whether policies of white liberals will protect blacks from crime

2 Comments
Economist Walter Williams
Economist Walter Williams

So, I’ve been talking about famous black economist Thomas Sowell, who helped me to form my views on economics in so many areas. But there’s another black economist who is very famous. My Dad sent me an article by Walter Williams where he looks at crime statistics and race. This is something that affects my family, because we aren’t white. When it comes to crime, which policies work to protect us?

Here is the column, which was published on Daily Wire:

Let’s… turn to a recent article by Heather Mac Donald, who is a senior fellow at the New York-based Manhattan Institute. She is a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent article, “A Platform of Urban Decline,” which appeared in Manhattan Institute’s publication Eye On The News, addresses race and crime. She reveals government statistics you’ve never read before.

According to leftist rhetoric, whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. Mac Donald says that may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. To make her case, she uses the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 survey of criminal victimization. Mac Donald writes: “According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.”

There are other stark figures not talked about often. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting for 2018, of the homicide victims for whom race was known, 53.3% were black, 43.8% were white and 2.8% were of other races. In cases where the race of the offender was known, 54.9% were black, 42.4% were white, and 2.7% were of other races.

So, what are the policies proposed to protect blacks from being the victims of crime? Well, there are three.

  1. white liberals want to encourage black women to raise fatherless children by normalizing sex before marriage, and paying black women to have children outside of marriage.
  2. white liberals want to confiscate the weapons that law-abiding blacks use to defend themselves from criminals.
  3. white liberals want to deny blacks school choice, trapping them into failing schools so that they can’t get out of dangerous neighborhoods by rising in education, career and finance.

In another column from Townhall, Williams quotes Malcolm X, who had a low opinion of these policies:

Malcolm X said: “The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

I think that blacks will do much better than they are now when they stop listening to the “compassion” of white liberals, and start looking at how they do living and working in a time of Republican policies. We have record low black unemployment now. It’s a curious sort of racism that believes in blacks to forge their own destinies, earning and choosing their way to success.

But some problems are not fixable with policies.

Williams notes:

The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers. In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80. Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent. In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households. Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone.

You can’t blame “the legacy of slavery” for the breakdown of the black family, because the black family was working great long after slavery was abolished.

So let me say something about myself and my marriage plan.

Because of my skin color, it would be natural for me to look to start a family with a black woman. According to marriage statistics, marriages where both spouses are the same color tend to succeed. But because of my Christian faith, I have to be a virgin myself, and I have to look for a virgin as a bride. But this standard is dead in the black community. Recreational sex with hot bad boys the rule, instead of choosing men who commit before sex. According to research, abstaining from sex before marriage is the best way to ensure that any children that are conceived in the marriage will grow up in a stable relationship with a father (me) in the home.

Unfortunately, white liberals don’t support me in these behaviors and plans. And black women agree with white liberals. They vote overwhelmingly for anti-marriage policies like promoting recreational sex in the schools, abortion, single mother welfare, no-fault divorce, redefining marriage to remove the requirement for complementary genders, etc.

According to exit polls, 98% of black women vote Democrat. They don’t do this by flipping a coin – they believe in Democrat policies. No marriage-minded man is going to be interested in entering a lifelong commitment with someone who supports anti-marriage policies.

News

Why is it so difficult for a working man to be sole provider and leader of a home?

14 Comments
Welfare spending
Welfare spending

So, I’ve noticed that many men who are interested in marriage have been running into problems with their plans. One challenge is the problem of the financial costs of marriage. In order to undertake a marriage enterprise, men have to believe that they can pay the bills. And this is especially challenging to men who want a stay-at-home wife to raise their children.

*Please note that I am talking about unmarried (never married, divorced) women throughout this post.

Here’s my argument for why I think that feminism has made it harder for men to afford to get married:

  1. Feminism caused no-fault divorce.
  2. No-fault divorce laws led to more frequent divorces.
  3. Divorced women turn to government for financial support.
  4. Taxes increase in order to pay for more government spending.
  5. Men who were interested in marriage were hit with higher taxes, which made marriage enterprise financially unfeasible for them.

Here’s the evidence for each point.

1. Feminism was behind no-fault divorce, according to this feminist, pro-no-fault-divorce writer.

Excerpt:

Households of 2010 don’t look quite like they did in 1969, when no-fault divorce actually was a controversial topic and these counter-arguments held some weight. The working dad/stay-at-home mom model of the middle class has been replaced by two-parent earner households and a growing number of working mom/stay-at-home dad arrangements. In working poor and impoverished families, the one-parent provider model was never the norm. No-fault divorce seemed scary when it had never before existed, but the truth is that its introduction was long overdue. Feminist groups at the time supported no-fault divorce, as it provided women an escape hatch from desperately unhappy marriages in a society where they were already disadvantaged on almost every level, regardless of their marital status. Imagine an abusive marriage in 1968, when the court-savvy abuser could actually force the victim to stay in the relationship forever. Imagine that now, and you know why domestic violence attorneys are in full support of introducing no-fault divorce to New York. And the judges aren’t the only problem.

Note that the author of this piece thinks that it is not women’s fault that they choose men who they then want to divorce. It’s not the woman’s fault that she is unhappy with the man she courted with and then chose and then made vows to. She isn’t responsible for choosing a good man with chastity, sobriety, moral convictions, etc. She thinks that women shouldn’t be held responsible for their choices. Also, feminists think that children do fine without fathers.

2. Easier divorces means more divorces.

Abstract:

This paper analyzes a panel of 18 European countries spanning from 1950 to 2003 to examine the extent to which the legal reforms leading to “easier divorce” that took place during the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the increase in divorce rates across Europe. We use a quasi-experimental set-up and exploit the different timing of the reforms in divorce laws across countries. We account for unobserved country-specific factors by introducing country fixed effects, and we include country-specific trends to control for time-varying factors at the country level that may be correlated with divorce rates and divorce laws, such as changing social norms or slow moving demographic trends. We find that the different reforms that “made divorce easier” were followed by significant increases in divorce rates. The effect of no-fault legislation was strong and permanent, while unilateral reforms only had a temporary effect on divorce rates. Overall, we estimate that the legal reforms account for about 20 percent of the increase in divorce rates in Europe between 1960 and 2002.

It seems obvious, but more evidence never hurts. About 70% of divorces are initiated by women, either because they chose to marry the wrong man, or because they become unhappy with the right man.

3. Marital instability causes women to vote for bigger government for security.

Excerpt:

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws.

[…]More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes.

Bigger government must be paid for by higher taxes, which makes it harder for one working man’s income to provide for a family. In fact, feminists wanted men to be displaced as sole-providers. They would prefer that women are “equal” to men, and that means making women get out and work like men. It was no concern of theirs that children would be raised by strangers in daycares and government schools.

4. Women are in fact observed to vote for bigger government.

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, the nation made history. It made history in electing the first African American president; it made history in building a bigger margin for the first female Speaker of the House; it made history in delivering the biggest Democratic margin since 1964; it made history in sending a record number of people to the polls and the highest percentage turnout since the 1960 election. Analysts will spend the next few months sifting through the data, trying to figure out what happened and why. Historians will likely spend the next several years and decades studying this election, as well. But one thing is immediately clear. Unmarried women played a pivotal role in making this history and in changing this nation. They delivered a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin to Barack Obama and delivered similarly strong margins in races for Congress and the U.S. Senate. Although unmarried women have voted Democratic consistently since marital status has been was tracked, this election represents the highest margin recorded and a 16-point net gain at the Presidential level from 2004.

In fact, there was a recent (2011) study showing that unmarried women do in fact vote for higher taxes and more government as a substitute for a husband’s provider role.

Abstract:

The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a political gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic party. We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer. Data for the United States support this argument. First, there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap – higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the Democrats among men but not women. Second, longitudinal data show that following marriage (divorce), women are less (more) likely to support the Democratic party.

What follows from voting Democrat?

If more people vote for Democrats then we will get higher taxes to pay for all the government spending. Higher taxes means that a married man can no longer retain enough of his earnings to support a family. And that means his wife has to work, and that means that his children will learn what the daycare workers and government school teachers decide they should learn.

But what do men want out of marriage? Men don’t want to marry a stressed-out competitor, and be yelled at in their own home. They want a homemaker who is focused on her husband and children. They want their children raised by someone who shares their worldview. Men want to produce moral, influential, independent children. Men want to be respected in their homes as sole provider. Men marry in order to lead on moral and spiritual issues. And men understand that a woman who doesn’t work outside the home usually makes a more feminine, supportive partner in the marriage enterprise.

If society, including the parents of daughters and the pastors of daughters, have decided that women don’t have to care about what men want out of marriage, then they should not be surprised that men don’t want marriage. Men may have no-commitment temporary sexual relationships with a secular left feminist who has been focused on her own feminist projects: travel, student loans, promiscuity, career, etc. But they certainly do not marry those women. When it comes to marriage, men want women who embrace the roles of wife and mother. And unlike shoes and handbags, we get a vote about whether or not the marriage happens.

News

Dennis Prager explains what feminism has achieved for women

7 Comments
Man and woman working on a computer upgrade
Man and woman working on a computer upgrade

Dennis Prager has summarized many of my viewpoints on this blog in a tiny, tiny little article. He calls it “Four Legacies of Feminism“.

Read the whole glorious thing and bask in its wisdom!

Full text:

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s feminist magnum opus, The Feminine Mystique, we can have a perspective on feminism that was largely unavailable heretofore.

And that perspective doesn’t make feminism look good. Yes, women have more opportunities to achieve career success; they are now members of most Jewish and Christian clergy; women’s college sports teams are given huge amounts of money; and there are far more women in political positions of power. But the prices paid for these changes — four in particular — have been great, and outweigh the gains for women, let alone for men and for society.

1) The first was the feminist message to young women to have sex just as men do. There is no reason for them to lead a different sexual life than men, they were told. Just as men can have sex with any woman solely for the sake of physical pleasure, so, too, women ought to enjoy sex with any man just for the fun of it. The notion that the nature of women is to hope for at least the possibility of a long-term commitment from a man they sleep with has been dismissed as sexist nonsense.

As a result, vast numbers of young American women had, and continue to have, what are called “hookups”; and for some of them it is quite possible that no psychological or emotional price has been paid. But the majority of women who are promiscuous do pay prices. One is depression. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently summarized an academic study on the subject: “A young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.”

Long before this study, I had learned from women callers to my radio show (an hour each week — the “Male-Female Hour” — is devoted to very honest discussion of sexual and other man-woman issues) that not only did female promiscuity coincide with depression, it also often had lasting effects on women’s ability to enjoy sex. Many married women told me that in order to have a normal sexual relationship with their husband, they had to work through the negative aftereffects of early promiscuity — not trusting men, feeling used, seeing sex as unrelated to love, and disdaining their husband’s sexual overtures. And many said they still couldn’t have a normal sex life with their husband.

2) The second awful legacy of feminism has been the belief among women that they could and should postpone marriage until they developed their careers. Only then should they seriously consider looking for a husband. Thus, the decade or more during which women have the best chance to attract men is spent being preoccupied with developing a career. Again, I cite woman callers to my radio show over the past 20 years who have sadly looked back at what they now, at age 40, regard as 20 wasted years. Sure, these frequently bright and talented women have a fine career. But most women are not programmed to prefer a great career to a great man and a family. They feel they were sold a bill of goods at college and by the media. And they were. It turns out that most women without a man do worse in life than fish without bicycles.

3) The third sad feminist legacy is that so many women — and men — have bought the notion that women should work outside the home that for the first time in American history, and perhaps world history, vast numbers of children are not primarily raised by their mothers or even by an extended family member. Instead they are raised for a significant part of their childhood by nannies and by workers at daycare centers. Whatever feminists may say about their only advocating choices, everyone knows the truth: Feminism regards work outside the home as more elevating, honorable, and personally productive than full-time mothering and making a home.

4) And the fourth awful legacy of feminism has been the demasculinization of men. For all of higher civilization’s recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family. That notion — indeed the notion of masculinity itself — is regarded by feminism as the worst of sins: patriarchy.

Men need a role, or they become, as the title of George Gilder’s classic book on single men describes them: Naked Nomads. In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father — of men as men, in other words. Most men want to be honored in some way — as a husband, a father, a provider, as an accomplished something; they don’t want merely to be “equal partners” with a wife.

In sum, thanks to feminism, very many women slept with too many men for their own happiness; postponed marriage too long to find the right man to marry; are having hired hands do much of the raising of their children; and find they are dating boy-men because manly men are so rare.

Feminism exemplifies the truth of the saying, “Be careful what you wish for — you may get it.”

I wish I could add something to this, but I can’t because every time I think of something to add, he says it in the next sentence. I think it’s so important for women to read about feminism, and to understand how women used to approach men and marriage before feminism. Women today don’t realize how their priorities have been changed from older generations, because of the promotion of feminism in the culture. Women today ought to take a step back and think about what works for them in the long term. What kind of man is the best kind? What do men want out of marriage? What should men and women do now to prepare for marriage?

If you like Prager’s short essay, then this medium essay arguing against feminism authored by Barbara Kay would be nice follow-up.